Get Technical

By the turn of the century, experts predict that every science
teacher in the country will have students in his or her classroom who
are not native English speakers.

Yet when Elizabeth Bernhardt and her former colleagues at the
National Center for Science Teaching and Learning looked through the
professional literature for information on how science teachers could
best teach those students, they came up almost empty-handed. Of the
nearly 8,000 pages of science teaching-methods textbooks they examined,
only 16 pages specifically mentioned second-language learners. And 13
of those came from the same book.

What they found even more discouraging was that some of the science
teachers they interviewed as part of their search told them they
weren't interested in the subject. "Our job is to teach science,''
Bernhardt recalls the teachers saying. "Send them when they're ready
for science, and then everything will be OK.''

But to the researchers at the Columbus, Ohio-based center, that
response was unacceptable. They knew from other studies that students
need six to eight years to become completely fluent in a second
language.

"If we're sitting around waiting six to eight years, then kids are
14 or 16, at best, before they can get into a science class,'' says
Bernhardt, who now directs the language center at Stanford
University.

Finding a better solution is what the recently completed NCSTL study
was all about. The project had a twofold mission: to determine how
science teachers could best address the needs of the second-language
learners and to get that message into the hands of teachers. In the
process, however, the research team discovered something else
altogether: For students learning a new language, many of the hands-on
methods now used and touted to teach science may do more harm than
good.

The NCSTL is one of more than 20 research centers supported by the
U.S. Department of Education. According to Michael Aiello, the center's
program manager, the question of how to teach science to culturally
diverse students has always been part of its mission.

Says Bernhardt: "Science knowledge is clearly the knowledge that is
going to give kids the greatest access to the greatest number of
opportunities in their lives. If kids don't get turned on to science in
the early grades, they're lost.''

Scientific vocabulary, she notes, poses a major stumbling block for
many second-language learners. Words such as "force'' and "mass'' that
have both a common and scientific meaning can be especially perplexing.
And scientific and technical terms that aren't used in everyday life
pose another whole set of challenges.

To carry out its research mission, the center hired Bernhardt, whose
previous work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in
Canada had focused on language learning. The directors reasoned that
her perspective could offer new insights for science educators. Yes and
no, Bernhardt found out. "It's not so easy to walk into somebody else's
field and say, 'Let me give you my perspective,' '' she says.

Besides combing the professional literature and interviewing science
teachers, Bernhardt and her team carefully studied two model
classrooms: a Spanish-language immersion classroom at Gladstone
Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio, and a program for Spanish-speaking
students considered at risk of failing at Santa Cruz (Calif.) High
School. They visited these classes over a period of months, videotaping
lessons, analyzing dialogue, and testing students. From those efforts,
they drew several conclusions.

First, while most science teachers they interviewed seemed to think
that the way to help struggling English speakers was to simplify their
teaching, the teachers in the two model programs succeeded by taking a
different tack. Instead of dumbing down instruction, they elaborated on
their science talk, emphasizing the proper vocabulary and giving
students more information if it was needed to help them make sense of
the content.

"When we use language that's chopped out or broken in some way,''
Bernhardt says, "we immediately deny kids exactly what they need, which
is access to scientific vocabulary.''

The model teachers also made what the researchers called "online
adjustments''--tailoring their lessons as they went along to plug in
the gaps they saw in students' knowledge or to draw out what students
knew but could not say.

The study team concluded that students often knew more than they
could express in an unfamiliar language. Allowing students to talk with
one another in their native tongues helped capitalize on that existing
knowledge base. And almost all the students were better at writing
about science than they were at speaking about it. "There's more time
to think and compose,'' Bernhardt explains.

The researchers' most controversial findings, however, are those
that raise questions about the current movement in science education to
give students more hands-on experiences.

Eight months into their nine-month observation of the 42 4th and 5th
graders at Gladstone Elementary, investigators decided to give 20
students an independent assessment. They asked the youngsters to read
four different text selections in Spanish, which was their second
language. One was a narrative, and the other three were expository
texts about the scientific method, the classification of animals, and
the planets. The students were asked to recall the texts in the
language they felt most comfortable with.

The researchers also examined the student's scores in reading,
vocabulary, and mathematics on a national standardized test. And,
finally, during the last month of the experiment, they gave the
children a performance assessment on the scientific method and the use
of variables. (Their task was to figure out how to determine the
absorbency of a paper towel.)

The researchers found that, for the most part, students' scores on
the Spanish reading tasks correlated with the standardized-test
measures. But neither of these measures could be linked to the results
of the performance assessment. The latter failed to show what kids
could glean from written texts. "What we think that tells us is that
the performance assessment does indeed tap behaviors other than those
generally tapped by more conventional measures,'' Bernhardt says. "At
the same time, however, that indicates that the performance assessment
doesn't tap literacy ability--the ability to glean information from
text materials.''

At Santa Cruz High School, where the students were learning English,
the researchers made a similar observation. Two weeks after the 15 or
so 10th graders in that program gave oral science reports in English,
many of them had trouble recalling what their presentations had been
about. "The kids were so concerned about their performance in
English,'' Bernhardt says, "that they had apparently done a lot of
memorizing to get through the report and do a good job.''

What all this means, Bernhardt and her colleagues have concluded, is
that the pendulum in the movement to reform science education may have
swung too far for students who struggle with a second language. Even in
exemplary second-language programs like the ones the center researchers
followed, teaching and testing that focus on the "doing'' of science
can have a cost. Performance assessments can give the false impression
that students know more--or less--than they do. And they simply do not
address scientific literacy skills.

"Much of the scientific endeavor is discussion and experimentation,
which is what performance assessment focuses on,'' Bernhardt says. "But
another part of the scientific endeavor is being informed about science
knowledge, and that is important, too.''

Such findings are not very popular these days. "You'd have to be
cautious about any recommendations that would say to reduce the amount
of time that kids have experiences with scientific phenomena,'' says
Kenneth Tobin, a professor of science education at Florida State
University. Tobin questions whether the center's evidence is strong
enough to support all of its conclusions. Still, he adds, "If students
are doing it and not learning, then we have to say, 'OK, how can we
develop the scientific discourse?' ''

Despite the skeptical reception their work has received, the
researchers have tried to get their message out to science educators
and reformers. If nothing else, they at least are drawing the attention
of teachers to the special needs of second-

language learners, notes Aiello, director of the science teaching
center. "In some sense, this issue was not on the radar screen at all
when we first started,'' he says. "Maybe now we're a blip on the
edge.''

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